When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use. The primary function of quotation marks is to set off and represent exact language either spoken or written that has come from somebody else. The quotation mark is also used to designate speech acts in fiction and sometimes poetry.
Since you will most often use them when working with outside sources, successful use of quotation marks is a practical defense against accidental plagiarism and an excellent practice in academic honesty.
The following rules of quotation mark use are the standard in the United States, although it may be of interest that usage rules for this punctuation do vary in other countries. The following covers the basic use of quotation marks. For details and exceptions consult the separate sections of this guide. Johnson, who was working in his field that morning, said, "The alien spaceship appeared right before my own two eyes. See here for a brief explanation of the British style. Unless they are part of the original quotation, all marks other than commas or periods are placed outside the quotation marks.
For more on the proper use of multiple punctuation at the end of a sentence, see here. Longer quotations should be set off from the main text, and are referred to as block quotations. Because the quoted material is set off from the main text, it is not necessary to use quotation marks. Style varies, but at a minimum a block quotation should have a bigger left-hand margin than the main text. In contrast to the main text, a block quotation might also have a bigger right-hand margin, be in a smaller or otherwise different font, or have reduced line spacing.
How do you determine if your quotation is short allowing it to be incorporated into the main text or long requiring a block quotation? It depends.
For academic writing, the MLA Handbook requires block quotations whenever the quoted material exceeds four lines, while the American Psychological Association APA requires block quotations for anything exceeding forty words. The Chicago Manual of Style suggests words or more as a general rule, but offers many factors other than length to be considered. The person reading your work needs to know where the quote starts and where it ends. What about some trickier quotation mark rules?
Does punctuation go inside or outside quotation marks? This question mostly refers to the sentence-ending punctuation marks— punctuation marks that introduce a quote are never placed within quotation marks.
Sentence-ending punctuation is a whole different story. In the United States, the rule of thumb is that commas and periods always go inside the quotation marks, and colons and semicolons dashes as well go outside :.
If they apply to the quoted material, they go within the quotation marks. If they apply to the whole sentence, they go outside it :. So now you know how to deal with quotation marks and punctuation and capitalization, but what if the quote you want to take already contains quotation marks? This can happen, too. Say you want to write a direct quote in which someone is praising their favorite chapter from one of the Harry Potter books.
Would you do it like this? You might even manage to confuse your word processing program. But if you do it like this, everything will look much better:. Titles of books, albums, magazines, newspapers, and other standalone and bigger bodies of work are usually italicized.
0コメント